The Christmas season isn’t all joy and merry-making for the local government.

For the Floyd County Commission, the end of the year means drafting a feasible budget for next year. And, with the county facing significant revenue loss, this is no easy task.

County manager Brian Williams says that both sales tax and property tax are historically down and Floyd is sitting somewhere close to $700,000 in the hole. In answer to this, he characterized the projected 2013 budget as very conservative.

“It’s a tight budget. Obviously, we don’t have our revenues and expenditures balanced. But, our revenues have been down. Our expenditures are also down; we’ve cut them by 3% from last year,” Williams said. “I would say we do conservatively budget. And, hopefully, we’ve built in some conservative projections that won’t be off by much at the end of the year.”

Though a deficient looms in the books, Williams said that the commission is still considering a potential raise for county employees. Another budgetary decision in the commission’s future is whether or not to eliminate sales tax on energy used by Manufacturers. A 6% decrease in sales tax revenue is expected over the next year, with this resolution factoring heavily into it.